1. Field of the Invention
This application relates to methods of gathering, storing, organizing and serving data related to online advertising in computerized social network application environments. More particularly, this application relates to a system and method of storing brand data in a database, associating the brand data with social publisher data and serving brand advertising data to social content in an online social network environment.
2. Description of the Related Technology
Traditionally, brand promoters have reached the target audience for their brands by advertising in various communication media such as print media, television, or radio. Over time, brand promoters learned that certain types of people tended to watch certain types of television shows. As a result, brand promoters began to purchase commercial time from television shows whose audience tended to fit the target demographic for the brand or product being promoted.
In recent years, the emergence of the Internet as an important communications medium has produced new opportunities for brand promoters to deliver an advertising message to consumers. Initially, advertising on the Internet was very inefficient, as brand advertisements were often displayed haphazardly in websites, without any consideration of the relevance of the ad to the other content in the website. In addition, many advertisements were served as “popup” windows, which quickly became viewed as a nuisance by many web users. Thus, brands that were presented in these forms often did not provide a positive impression to the consumer viewing the brand advertisement.
Eventually, owners and operators of websites that served advertisements devised more effective technology solutions which allowed brand promoters advertising on their sites to reach their target audiences. One of the solutions that has become popular is the use of contextual based advertising. Contextual ad-serving technology provides brand promoters and other advertisers a way to place contextually relevant ads across networks of hundreds of thousands of publishers, without having to evaluate and approve each advertisement. Contextual ad-serving systems assess a number of variables, including the text on the web page, to determine which ads to serve on the page. The most relevant advertisement for the content of the page is served, which presumably may be of the most interest to the person viewing that web page.
FIG. 1A provides an illustration of how a contextual-based web advertising system may operate. At block 100, a website operator may receive advertisements from advertisers for displaying on the website. These advertisements may be stored in a database. When a web user requests a page from the website, the text on that page is analyzed at block 102 to determine the type of information included in the requested web page. At block 104, the system determines the most relevant advertisements based on the content of the web page. Finally, at bock 106, the system serves the requested web page, and includes the most relevant advertisements along with the page content.
More recently, behavioral ad serving systems have been developed which take into account not only the content of the web page, but also the viewer of the web page. Using behavioral ad-serving technology, the emphasis is placed not only on the content but an analysis of the viewer of the content. These types of systems typically evaluate the viewer's past online actions and pages viewed, often through the use of cookies or some other tracking technology.
FIG. 1B provides an illustration of how a behavioral ad-serving web application may operate. At block 110, the website operator/content provider receives advertisements from advertisers and stores the advertisements in a database. At block 112, a user requests a page on the website. Next, at block 114, the website obtains the past online actions of the user, possibly by reading a cookie stored in the user's browser. Finally, at block 116, the website analyzes the past online actions of the user, and delivers an advertisement that is most relevant to those actions.
Behavioral advertising such as that described in FIG. 1B has limitations. For example, consider a viewer who had recently viewed web pages about motorcycles. In a system utilizing behavioral advertising, an ad relating to trucks would be served to the user if he requested a page in the system. However, the requested page might have nothing to do with trucks. For example, the user could be online looking for ballet lessons for his daughter. If the page found (listing ballet lessons) is a member of a behavioral advertising network, a truck ad would be served along with the page, and would seem grossly out of place and contexts. In the past few years, a new kind of website has gained prominence within the Internet realm—the social networking website. Well-known examples of social networking websites are MySpace.com, Facebook.com, Classmates.com, LiveJournal, and Friendster.com. To date, brand promoters have not been successful in leveraging current ad-serving technologies to associate their brands with social content produced and maintained on social networking websites. One reason that brands have not been able to leverage current ad-serving systems for association with social content and other user generated content is that major brands have significant value at risk when associating their brand with content of any sort. Millions of dollars are spent carefully crafting brand messages in order to build intangible corporate assets. For this reason, brands are particularly careful about the content with which consumers will associate their brands.